May 24th, 2016: Atlanta at New York

Just the Facts, Ma'am: For the second straight game, the Liberty faded down the stretch, and for the second straight game, they took an overtime loss, this time to Atlanta, 85-79. Tiffany Hayes had 27 points and 11 rebounds to lead the Dream; Atlanta got 15 points after halftime from Angel McCoughtry, who did not play most of the first half. Tina Charles had a monster game in the loss for New York, with 29 points, 10 rebounds, seven steals, and six assists- but Sugar Rodgers (10 points) was the only other Liberty player to crack double digits in scoring.

For screaming, so much screaming, new living room decorations, passionate road fans, cool kids, defensive lapses, Huskies crying wolf, chemistry issues, questionable play-calling, so very many missed opportunities, and lousy officiating, join your intrepid and transient blogger after the jump.
Good morning, everyone! It's your intrepid blogger's least favorite sort of game of the year- School Day, the 11 AM start that messes with my circadian rhythm and forces me to endure thousands of screaming children for the sake of my team. To be honest, I was seriously considering skipping this one, but for work-related political reasons, I decided to take the days I was entitled to.

Of course, if there are children, there are thundersticks. They're black and white, but the 20th anniversary logo is pretty well done.

Atlanta rushed off in a hurry. Reshanda Gray disappointed the kids, but Meighan Simmons at least stopped for pictures (and for my hat, yay!).

We have a biddy game to start things off, and people are so adorably hyped when one of those little kids hits a shot. One kid runs a pretty nice fast break but is just too tiny to hit a lay-up. (No, seriously, between the braids and the gait, she looks like a very tiny Spoon, my heart is exploding with squee.)

God bless you for coming up here, you decked out Dream fan, but you're behind the wrong bench.

At halftime, New York is up 39-32, but the bigger issue for Atlanta is that Angel McCoughtry came out very early in the first quarter and did not return. She's been on the bench, but not playing. We're enduring an anti-bullying lecture/slam poetry session.

The kids behind us are into the game and loathe the officials as much as we do, so that's cool.

The officials have been lousy. The FT differential is ridiculous. Then Mount Laimbeer exploded, and now both teams are getting crappy calls on them.

Tiffany Hayes leads Atlanta with 13; Tina Charles has 10 for New York. Both teams are missing open shots and multiple looks.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGH AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGH RRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGH

Okay, fine, I'll write coherent Game Notes for you. They're going to be more collaborative than usual, since the Queen Mother and I are hashing the game out as I type.

Atlanta did a marvelous job playing the passing lanes and deflecting balls. That's one thing they're brilliant at. They closed like a trap and batted the ball away. 11 blocks and 13 steals- and that's just what made it into the stats.

Michael Cooper worked heavily with his deep bench in the first half. Everyone saw time. Reshanda Gray's only minutes were in the first half, and even then the announcer almost forgot to mention her existence. She was physical, but otherwise unremarkable. Rachel Hollivay hits hard- she bodied up early and often on the Liberty posts. She had good looks at the basket, but she missed them- then again, the rim at that end of the floor was doing odd things to shots. Lots of stuff was rimming out. Cierra Burdick's first half minutes were unremarkable, but there's something I would like about having her on the floor if I were a Dream fan. It might be the defense. She needs to lay off shooting after the whistle, though.

Meighan Simmons is still very fast, and still likes to shoot a lot, and is still terribly inaccurate when she does. I'm not quite sure when she managed to block a shot, but we were getting swatted a lot by a lot of hands; that might have been a block-by-committee that got assigned to her. Matee Ajavon played very briefly, missed an easy shot, and generally still gets under my skin just for existing, but I acknowledge and accept that it's mostly irrational. Carla Cortijo passes the ball very fast and very hard- in that regard, like a young Ticha Penicheiro. I think at least two turnovers were because the ball got there before the recipient. She's a good energy player. Bria Holmes did a good job drawing fouls and getting to the line, although with this officiating crew pretty much anyone in an Atlanta uniform could draw fouls.

Layshia Clarendon brought the defense (and as usual, the epic hair). She didn't play as much down the stretch, with Cooper going to Cortijo instead, but she came in for defensive shifts. She plays good, heady defense. I feel like I'm harping, but she was utterly useless on offense. Tiffany Hayes appears to have been working on her upper body strength- with the thickness of her shoulders and the long skinny braids, she was starting to remind me of Loree Moore. She took a lot of hits and fell down a lot. Either she has the strange combination of low pain threshold/high pain tolerance, or she gives no damns about her body, or she's really good at acting like she's hurt. It cost her on one play, where she hit the deck and no foul was called. That was a rarity. She got the call most of the night. She killed us from outside, and she killed us penetrating, and I'm pretty sure by the end of the night she had people wanting to strangle either her or the defender who kept bailing on her. (Ahem. Ta'Shauna.) She's reckless and wild and one of these days she's going to have a 2-19 night and kill her team that way. But if she were a Lib her jersey would be flying off the shelves.

Angel McCoughtry left the game very early in the first quarter, and she was limping when she came back for the second half. Whatever it was, either she got over it or they gave her some mighty fine painkillers to take care of it, because she lit up in the fourth quarter and overtime. That was the Angel we know to fear. She's still convinced she's a distance shooter, but as a Liberty fan I'm okay with that. She and Sancho Lyttle are still one of the most lethal double-team traps in the league, with long arms and active hands and absolutely no give. The two of them together forced I don't know how many turnovers off steals or rebounds or missed shots. Lyttle's shot was off, but for brief moments she looked like the Sancho Lyttle of the Houston Comets. And defensively, of course, she was ridiculous. Her hands were everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Elizabeth Williams was a calm center in the midst of the frenetic defensive activity. She's solid. She could stand to work on her free throw shooting, and she's got to finish at the rim, but she's an excellent piece for the next stage of the Dream's life cycle.

I like the Dream's uniforms. For them, that pop of red on the collar works, and the blue on blue is reasonably attractive. I'm not so sure about the gray jackets, though.

I think the training staff really needs to do something about this recto-cranial inversion that Brittany Boyd is suffering from. It's really getting ridiculous. She's trying too hard to take the fancy shot when she could settle for the straight up shot. She's telegraphing her passes. I want her to succeed so very badly- I'm typing these words while wearing a Boyd jersey, and y'all know how I feel about the price of jerseys. But the pressure is getting to her, or something is getting to her. Her body language is really bad. Everything seems to be accompanied by a grimace or almost a growl. I really hope she's okay. Shoni Schimmel played briefly at the end of the game, and just like last game, she went in about two possessions after she was really needed. She looked to be in a little better shape than she was last game. Something's off with Shavonte Zellous, too. Her shot is off, and because her shot is off, it's throwing off her entire game. She seems like she's trying too hard to draw contact and not enough to actually hit the shot. If you're not getting the calls, learn to recognize that and move on.

Kiah Stokes had a nice sequence with two blocks, and was solid defensively, but she's got to be more assertive on offense. I thought she played well on the boards and in the middle. Amanda Zahui B saw a few minutes in the first half, but she looked like she was out of sync with the team on both ends of the floor. Maybe she's not a morning person. I've been there. Swin Cash hit her free throws, which was more than I can say for most of our posts. It's good to have her defense and her leadership back. She's still a little rusty, but that's to be expected.

Tina Charles went into beast mode today. I'm not going to give her too much grief for the missed free throws, though it would have been nice if she hit one of them in regulation. But she put everything out on the floor and played out of her mind. Inside, outside, swatting shots, claiming boards, deflecting balls- I don't know how many of those steals were legitimately hers and how many she just initiated that other people took off down the floor. She was phenomenal. Carolyn Swords has to finish at the rim. She had offensive rebounds and chances to score, and she missed at the rim again and again. I like what she brings, but I need to see more of it.

Lindsey Harding was missing a lot of shots short, and we were irked that she wasn't getting yelled at for them. Katie Smith eventually took her aside and gave her a talking to, but it didn't seem like it had much of an effect. Sugar Rodgers had another bad shooting night, and reverted back to the approach of "keep shooting, it'll go in eventually". It didn't go in all that much, except for the wild shot to force overtime and drag the suffering out further. She was out of position a lot on defense. If Hayes is shooting as well as she was, why in God's name would you repeatedly leave her open to go double? Why is this a good plan? Tanisha Wright was okay, nothing more. I'm still worried about her shot and her tendency to pass out of good looks, though those two are probably related.

Bill, we need to talk. A lot. We need to talk about you sitting back with your feet up like you're chilling at the bar as Atlanta goes on a run. We need to talk about you hoarding timeouts like you get a bonus for having them left at the end of the game. We need to talk about you grinding the offense to a halt in the last seven minutes and clocking the ball. (I'm pretty sure Stringer was yelling at you to get the offense moving, Bill.) We need to talk about your personnel decisions in overtime, and why you won't use Shoni even as a decoy when you need three-pointers. We need to talk about why this team doesn't know their defensive schemes, and why people are out of position, and why we're not hitting free throws. Something's not right here, and 70% of what went wrong in this game comes down to coaching and coaches' responsibilities.

And then there were the officials. So many bad calls. So much contact allowed at one end and called on the other. And then so many bad calls on both ends of the floor. There was one play that should have been a jump ball and ended up being nothing at all. So many bad calls. So very many bad calls. And they went on both sides after Laimbeer blew his top.

Seriously, that Dream fan was amazing. She came up that morning, from Georgia (she had the Georgia voter pin on her visor), fully decked out: visor, pins, lanyard, schedule, shirt, wristbands, thundersticks, the whole nine yards. We should all be so passionate about our teams. (She was kind enough to pass along the thundersticks when I asked if she had extras. They will hold a place of great honor among the others in our living room.) I hope the rest of her trip to New York is full of magic, wonder, joy, and good karma.

I'm really wondering if Bill is still the right coach for this team. He's brilliant at evaluating talent, for the most part, and he trades well. If we could carve out a position for him to be in charge of that, and let someone else coach, and let Bernert continue to handle the business end, I think we'd be well off. But I've been questioning more and more of his decisions in the flow of the game. Getting outcoached by Michael Cooper has to stick in his craw. Right?

Kids, it's only a t-shirt. You don't have to fight each other like dogs over a bone. Don't get hurt over it. The Torch Patrol overshot their tee guns a bit, aiming for the upper deck and hitting the bridge a couple of times.

We need our young guards to get their act together. We need our veterans to play like veterans. We need someone who can make the chemistry work. Who's going to step up?